Séminaire BSE – programme 3

S.Voigt et J. Gutmann

(Insitute of Law and economics – University of Hamburg)

 Once Upon a Time: Introducing the Historical Values Survey 

Mahdi KHESALI (Institute of Law & Economics, University of Hamburg and Max Planck Institute for Research Into Collective Goods, Bonn, Germany. Email: Mahdi.khesali@ile-hamburg.de )
Stefan VOIGT (Institute of Law & Economics, University of Hamburg and CESifo, Munich, Germany; Email: Stefan.Voigt@uni-hamburg.de )
Nadia VON JACOBI (Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento, Italy; nadia.vonjacobi@unitn.it )

Values and norms are important factors shaping how people interact. The values and norms held by individuals and shared among groups of individuals can have far-reaching consequences on economic and political development. Some of the values contemporaneously held by people across the globe are regularly collected by surveys such as the World Values Survey. Although it is often maintained that values and norms are largely time-invariant, empirical evidence supporting that claim has been virtually non-existent as a dataset containing historically prevalent values and norms has been lacking. 

This article introduces such a dataset, the Historical Values Survey (HistoVaS). Since we are interested in the potential relevance of values and norms for economic and political development, the focus is on variables that have been shown to affect development. These include norms of cooperation, altruism, work ethic, entrepreneurship, tolerance and the relationship to authority. Norms of cooperation and altruism influence how people interact with each other, work ethic norms are expected to (co-)determine productivity levels whereas norms encouraging entrepreneurship are likely to affect innovation rates and technological progress. We also report norms on how to cope with authority as norms favoring obedience to authorities are expected to be associated with more despotic political regimes. 

The HistoVaS introduced in this article uses folktales as its source of information. Folktales have been an important tool for transmitting values and norms across generations. This makes them ideal candidates for inferring historically valid values 2 

and norms across the world. To produce the HistoVaS, we have relied on some 16,000 folktales from 136 countries. These countries represent approximately 95 percent of the world population. Combined with a survey instrument containing 76 variables, the folktales were fed to GPT, which produced replies for each folktale separately. The HistoVaS database is based on such replies. 

To illustrate the potential usefulness of the HistoVaS, we associate data on historical values with contemporaneous ones and document a remarkable degree of time-invariance. Interpreting HistoVaS variables as a proxy for culture, we ask whether they help in explaining contemporaneous per capita income differences across countries. The answer is a resounding yes. 

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